Sue Waters at Edublogger publishes the first in a series of posts called What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part I. This initial article provides an overview of what podcasting is and will be followed by entries detailing how to host podcasts on your blog and how to create both audio and video podcasts.
From iLibrarian blog
The Wired Campus points to a new study titled How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences presented at this year’s EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper surveys academics at five recent conferences to determine the usefulness of Twitter as a communication “back channel” at these events.
“Microblogging at conferences seems to be an additional way of discussing presented topics and exchanging additional information. It is not limited to the face-to-face audience or the location of the conference. Microblogging rather allows virtually anyone to actively participate in the thematic debates. Our research shows that several conference speakers and attendees are using Twitter for various purposes. Communicating and sharing resources seem to be one of the most interesting and relevant ways in which one microblogs.”
From iLibrarian blog
From Celia:
People from all walks of business came from near and far to hear the wisdom of our local Net Prophets - some even making the journey from as far as Joburg and Durban just to be part of the event! Those who attended were treated to a series of world-class presentations, unearthing a wealth of knowledge, insight and vision of what the future webscape looks like in the South African context.
The astonishing turnout, passion and general buzz before and after the event is certainly evidence of that the ‘Silicon Cape’ is indeed alive and well.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Innovation Fund, RSAWEB and White Wall Web for making this event possible.
The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize. The use of PLEs may herald a greater emphasis on the role that metacognition plays in learning, enabling students to actively consider and reflect upon the specific tools and resources that lead to a deeper engagement with content to facilitate their learning.
The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.
In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7049.pdf
ELI 7 Things You Should Know, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (05/12/2009)...
Key Characteristics of Digital Natives:
They interact with the peers across the globe: This impacts employers, brands, teachers, parents, as this first generation enters the workforce.
Always online: By age 20, kids will have spent 20,000 hours online –the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing Urs Gasser, paraphrased
Multiple identities, personal and social, shared online and offline (blurring): Online representation is the same as physical representation: what your clothes, friends, vehicles say about you.Extensive disclosure of personal data: 35% of girls in US are writing a blog vs 20% boys. Opportunity for HR departments to learn more about their employees, but guess what? They Google you too.
Culture of sharing: The default behavior is information sharing, not only do they have the right to speak, but to be heard. Risk: breach of confidentiality is hip, digital natives are fans of wikileaks.
Creators, no longer passive users: This generation creates their own content and shares their opinion online, see the Forrester’s social Technographics to learn about the data.
Information processing habits: Pointed out that the second most popular social network was YouTube. They often ‘graze’ the headlines and don’t often read the full article. (I guess few natives will read this far? Prove me wrong in the comments). Opportunities: companies should allow natives to increase creativity to rip, mix, burn content to encourage interaction.
Peer collaboration, online activism: They often experience work with community builders, and are responsive to intrinsic motizations.
Learning through browsing: Yes wrestles with amount & quality of information, generational “multitakers”. They may not be able to identify qualified and expert sources. “If it’s online, it must be true!”
From:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/05/14/what-companies-should-know-about-digital-natives/http://audiovideo.economist.com/
The audio and video segments of the Economist online are plentiful, and free. There is no need to register to start listening or watching. Furthermore, there is a very handy feature that allows a visitor to add a segment to their playlist, if they are overwhelmed by all the great choices and don't want to forget to hear them all. On the left side of the screen, visitors can choose view their options by "video", "audio", or "subject". Subject includes categories such as "Asia", "The Americas", "Books and Arts", and "Science and technology". These topics can also be found in the link entitled "From the Audio Edition". The link entitled "Videographics" is a unique feature that should appeal to visual learners, as it uses animated graphics, charts or graphs, rather than photographs or film, to explain a newsworthy concept, such as "A short, recent history of Congo" or "Explaining the Money Markets". Visitors should not miss the video segments called "Kal's cartoons", the link to which is found on the left hand side menu. In these videos, the political cartoonist for the magazine explains various features of his cartoons. "Kal on Thatcher" explains how he drew the former Prime Minister and why. Same goes for "Kal on Bill" and "Kal on Reagan". "The Debate We'd Like To See" with Obama and Hillary Clinton as game show contestants and Regis Philbin as the host may no longer be current, but it is laugh out loud funny, nonetheless. [KMG]
From Scout Report
Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 with offices in the United States and Argentina. Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.
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With Idealist, you can: Sign up: receive daily alerts with new opportunities matching your interests, create a personal profile to network with other Idealists Share: invite friends and colleagues to join us here Follow this story: read our blog, listen to our podcasts, get an RSS feed of any search result on the site
Post: list your organization on Idealist and post opportunities, program information, events, and more Join: find or start an Idealist Group to connect with others Link: display content from Idealist on your website Explore: learn about community action, nonprofits, and more in our resource centers Donate: make a contribution to support this work From Celia: I have used it to find lists of NGOs in different countries
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Why did I do this? My professor had challenged me with two statements on the first day of class: 1) No student had ever aced his introductory exam; and 2) all the answers could be found in the first 7 chapters of the textbook.
Determined to be the first student to ace his test, I memorized all 7 chapters.
If you’re looking for a way to increase the capacity of your memory or pass a test, you don’t need to memorize 23,000 words. But the technique I used to memorize those chapters can be used to memorize anything. Below is the simpler version of my system, developed to help my pupils pass history, psychology, and other information-heavy tests...[More]
Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb discusses a 3-part series of posts by Greg Boutin in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. The article tackles three big post-Web 2.0 buzzwords, providing explanations on what each of these trends are and where they’re going.
From iLibrarian blog
Ben Parr of Mashable posts a guide to hashtags - one of Twitters more advanced features. Hashtags, or topics with a hash (#) symbol in front of them are used by Twitterers to take part in conversations on a particular subject, or around a specific event and organize all of those associated tweets. To find out more, check out the post which covers the following:
The new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha launched on Friday amid a flurry of media attention. Searchers using this engine can enter a question or a calculation, and rather than return relevant results, Wolfram Alpha uses its algorithms to digest the query and compute the answer based on its collection of data. Try it out by searching for the next solar eclipse, the GDP of Norway, or the Nobel Prize winners from France. Scientists, researchers and techies alike will be interested in this new computational search engine which is running on R Smarr, the world’s 44th largest supercomputer, created by launch partners, R Systems.
Further reading on the topic:
Resource of the Week — Fast Facts Anyone? A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha
By Gary Price, Chief/Founding Editor
As of 10:34 PM EDST on Friday, May 15, 2009 the site is live.
Since Wolfram|Alpha, (W|A) — a new fact/answer engine (the company calls it a “computational knowledge engine”) — was preparing to go live over the weekend of May 15-17, we decided to give it a try. Thanks to the Wolfram team for the the early access. Here’s our brief report and hopefully some other useful information for future W|A users.
The Question Everyone Is Asking
NO, W|A is not a Google or any other general-purpose web engine killer
. W|A works differently than Google, Yahoo, Live.com, Ask.com and other
engines. If anything, W|A helps make some invisible — i.e., “deep web”
— data useful by getting it out of the silos that are often difficult
to find and access.
Google and those other engines crawl the web and find unstructured pages/content to add to their databases. Think of Google as an encyclopedia — not the best analogy, I know, but it works here. It’s massive and has content on thousands and thousands of topics.
On the other hand, W|A searches organized data sets (time series, etc.), or creates them (using both electronic and print resources), and has curators (aka editors) massage and manage the structured data before it goes into the database. (Remember that most web engine databases are full of unstructured data.) Quality, currency, and accuracy are key. Not only do curators find new data sources, but they also watch for the data sets to be updated, at which point they update the content in the W|A database.
BTW, look for W|A to be adding new and updating old data on a regular basis. Hopefully, they’ll have a page that documents the changes as new data enters the database and older data is updated.
If Google is an encyclopedia, than W|A is a “must have” almanac. It’s also a “must have” resource for use at the busy reference desk. Even though the database covers many areas, W|A is going to be gold for science and engineering information professionals. And remember — it’s free.
This from a CNN article:
It’s not a new Google. It’s not supposed to be. It’s very complimentary, in a way, to what search engines do, said Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, the company behind W|A.
However, not every answer and domain of knowledge is in the W|A database. Founder Stephen Wolfram says in a video that the project is really just getting started. So we’ll Just have to wait and see.
Wolfram says W|A consists of four pillars:
If W|A doesn’t have the answer, you’ll get a blank results page and/or perhaps some suggestions to retry your search.
This is why it’s important to spend some time with the W|A database to get an idea of what it can and can’t do. This is no different than learning a new print or electronic resource that you purchase from a book or database vendor. Trust us on this onem W|A is also fun to use — especially if you’re a fact junkie.
One interesting feature is that if you enter multiple search terms (e.g., surnames), the answer is returned in an easy-to-read comparison box.
Syntax
Since this a question-and-answer type of engine, natural language works
best. For math-related queries, math symbols (+, -, %, etc.) work. The
/ sign works for dividing.
Why the Name Wolfram|Alpha?
Wolfram comes from the name of the company’s founder, Dr. Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram’s primary product, Mathematica, is used by tens of thousands of mathematicians and engineers.
Let’s Search
The search box — what you see on the W|A home page — is nothing new. It
looks and behaves like any other familiar search box. This early in the
game, it’s difficult to say what W|A’s strengths and weaknesses are. As
we pointed out above, every domain of knowledge is not yet in the
database.
Here are a few queries the company suggests that new users try:
+ enter any date (e.g. a birth date)
July 4, 1776
+ enter any town (e.g. a home town)
New York
+ enter any two stocks
IBM Apple
+ enter any calculation
$250 + 15%
or
x+5=y
+ A name
+ Pi
+ Carbon
+ Buffalo Weather November 12, 1978
Visit this page to access even more examples of the types of searches W|A can handle.
Results Page
Again, your results page is based on your query, but in many cases
you’ll find lists, tables, graphs, and much more. Every results page is
different, based on the content that’s been found in the W|A database.
This annotated results page does a good job of illustrating some of what you’ll find on a W|A results page.
Perhaps the MOST important part of the search results box is found near the bottom of the page. It’s labeled “source information.” Click the link and you’ll see the many sources W|A used to come up with the results. It will be interesting to see if/how major bibliographic citation styles handle W|A data.
Also, at the bottom of a results page, is a link that will turn the results page into a PDF file to print or download. Very useful.
If W|A doesn’t work for you or you want to see results from another engine, look for the “Search the Web” box in the right rail. There you can select from Google, Yahoo, and Live.com and get results.
W|A also does its best to handle disambiguation. If you type “Apple,” it will default to information about the computer company. But it also provide clickable links near the top of the page if what you really wanted was information about the fruit.
Remember
Researchers have different information needs, and they need the right
tool at the right time to get the job done. Without the right tool, the
end result will be frustration and aggravation. For many types of
queries — not all — W|A will be a welcome addition. It’s not the
solution, but it can be a valuable tool in the researcher’s toolbox.
Remember — no research tool is perfect for all research questions, but
W|A does a very good job of providing authoritative results to many
type of queries.
But not all queries. For example, a search for The Beatles or Rolling Stones returns zilch. But other pop culture queries do generate results. A note says that the topic — music performers — like many other categories (including commercial products) are being reviewed. Stay tuned.
What’s Missing?
Well, plenty. No site is perfect. That said, two items come to mind every time I visit the site.
Update: W|A looks o.k. on an iPhone. However, a native app would be even better.
Update 2: More Searches to Try:
+ Occupations: Actor
+ Find Words Matching a Pattern: Gol___
+ Member Countries of an Organization: WHO
+ Movies: Gone with the Wind
+ People: Plato
+ Books: Gone With the Wind
+ Decipher Between 2 Dates: This Monday ||| Last Monday
+ Holidays: Pay Special Attention to How W|A Disamibugates the U.S. Holiday vs. other “Labor Days” Around the World.
+ Songs: Stairway to Heaven
+ Genealogical Tree: Great Uncle
+ Animals: Giraffe
+ Musical Notes
Note the “Listen To” Link
From The Resourceshelf
Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.
A fascinating Youtube video The Machine is Us/ing Us opened the Netprophets Conference last week.
Celia
